Fidel Castro Named Winner of Confucius Peace Prize

In the West, few observers would consider Fidel Castro a consummate peacemaker. Some in China beg to differ.

This week, as the Nobel Peace Prize was formally handed to a teenage Pakistani activist and an Indian child-rights campaigner, a Chinese group issued an alternate award to the retired Cuban leader, long regarded by Western counterparts as a tyrant and Cold War nemesis.

Organizers of the Confucius Peace Prize, named after the Chinese sage and styled as a platform for China’s views on peace and human rights, had a decidedly different take.

“Mr. Castro, during his leadership of Cuba, didn’t use force or violence when resolving conflicts and problems in international relations and Cuba’s ties with the U.S.,” said the Chinese state-run Global Times, citing a member of the Confucius prize jury. “This has important inspirational meaning with regard to the resolution of current international conflicts.”

Fidel Castro

The jury was also impressed with Mr. Castro’s “active” diplomacy in retirement and “important contributions” to nuclear disarmament, the Global Times said in a Thursday report. These qualities helped the 88-year-old stand out from a shortlist of 14 individuals and two organizations, including South Korean President Park Geun-hye, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and the Chinese Taoism Association.

But Mr. Castro, who formally stepped down in 2008 after nearly five decades in power, wasn’t in Beijing to lap up the honor. He was represented by a group of Cuban students, who left the “grand” award ceremony with a golden Confucius statue and prize certificate, the Global Times said.

Mr. Castro’s no-show follows a familiar script for the prize, which has endured a troubled start since its launch in 2010.

Former Taiwanese vice president Lien Chan, the inaugural winner, didn’t attend his award ceremony—his aides said at the time they weren’t even notified. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2011 award was picked up by Russian exchange students, while former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan also didn’t appear for his prize ceremony a year later.

The prize’s apparent irrelevance to its own recipients wasn’t lost on China’s online community.

“If Confucius, in the netherworld, was to know of this, he would be confused and embarrassed,” a user wrote on the Weibo social-media service, referring to Mr. Castro’s award. “Originally the frontrunners for this prize were Saddam [Hussein] and [Muammar] Gaddafi, but unfortunately they have since flown away to paradise,” another Weibo user wrote, referring to the late former dictators of Iraq and Libya.

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Chinese officials have long distanced themselves from the Confucius Peace Prize, even as they condemned its Norwegian equivalent in 2010, when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to jailed Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo. In 2011, China’s Ministry of Culture said the prize would be discontinued. The prize is now run by the China International Peace Studies Center, a group of academics that says it isn’t affiliated with the government.

It isn’t clear what Mr. Castro makes of the award. He has rarely appeared in public since falling gravely ill in 2006, and was last reportedly seen in January attending the opening of a cultural center in Havana.